We Should Praise, Instead of Condemn, Dennis Rodman’s Return Visit to North Korea

Vexing the U.S. government again, basketball star Dennis Rodman has made a repeat visit to North Korea to visit its leader Kim Jong-un. After his last trip, which brought howls of protest from Washington’s foreign policy establishment and self-righteous screaming by media pundits about his coddling of a despot, I wrote one of the few pieces in defense of Rodman’s trip. After that, he jokingly refers to me as his "foreign policy advisor," but I had no role in his decision to visit the hermit nation again or in the planning for it. Yet, I must, for a second time, rise to his defense.

Critics correctly point out that North Korea, under Kim’s young reign, has
been fairly hostile toward America and the West and has continued its abysmal
human rights abuses. Yet it is dangerous to demonize even harsh dictators, such
as Kim, because that it makes it more likely that the United States will eventually
feel the need to use war to "take them out." For example, the United
States first demonized and then ousted Manuel Noriega in Panama, Slobodan Milosevic
in Serbia, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi
in Libya. Forebodingly, the US government has also demonized Bashar al-Assad
in Syria and is now pushing for armed attack on him. American foreign policy
often hypocritically and haughtily ostracizes autocrats toward which it has
less than amicable relationships, while turning a blind eye toward and supporting
the actions of friendly despots – for example, the Shah of Iran, who had the
worst human rights record on the planet when he was a U.S. client state and
more recently in Yemen, Bahrain, and Egypt, which have governments that have
forcibly put down "Arab spring" uprisings. The United States has also
supported the Saudi Arabian monarchy, which has one of the worst human rights
records in the world, and other authoritarian Persian Gulf states that float
on a sea of oil.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that gassing your own people, as Assad may
well have done, or running appalling gulags and committing other human rights
abuses, as Kim has done, are OK. The US government and media should rightly
condemn such practices, but it is very difficult for the United States to change
such dictators’ internal transgressions without itself committing a violation
of international law by attacking or invading a country without self-defense
as an excuse. And even then, US intervention is likely to make a mess of things,
as it has in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

In Syria, we have the ridiculous situation of an impending US military strike
only after Assad used poison gas to kill about 1,400 people, while ignoring
his killing of more than 100,000 with bombs and bullets. In fact, while the
US strike is pending, Assad will probably kill another 1,400 in the same place
– East Ghouta in the Damascus suburbs – by his recent resumption of heavy aerial
bombardment as an "in your face gesture" toward America. And as Milsosevic
did in Kosovo in 1999, after the United States began bombing the Serbs, he ratcheted
up the ethnic cleansing and killing of Albanians because he no longer had anything
to lose. Similarly, Assad could taunt the United States after any US strike
by launching even bigger chemical attacks on his own people.

Likewise, US military exercises usually trigger a hostile response from North
Korea. It is not good that North Korea probably has a small stockpile of nuclear
weapons and acts up periodically to get more Western aid. But trying to isolate,
politically and economically, an already paranoid nuclear weapons state is not
productive – if nothing else, because a poor North Korea, desperate for money,
then would be more likely to try to sell its nuclear technology abroad. And
threatening militarily, or even attacking, a state with nuclear weapons has
always been a really bad idea.

If the US foreign policy establishment were smarter, instead of condemning
Rodman for his efforts at basketball diplomacy, they would use the valuable
back channel to talk to Kim’s isolated regime. In fact, the United States doesn’t
have much else going for it with North Korea, as the cancellation of American
diplomat Robert King’s scheduled trip indicates. US containment policy has failed,
and it has few other interlocutors with that regime.